Guild Wars 2

Centurion.7296:

“nope that sounds stupid”, back to the OPs statement, ok lets say there is food in pvp, all people with for example a zerk build would do is use food to get more dps, same with bankers builds would use it to get more health/toughness, or some would use it to balance their builds, so in effect it would just be almost useless

Nope.
All the people running a condi build will get food with +40% condi duration, all the people running anything else will get food with -40% condi duration.

I feel like celestial is in a good place right now.
They already nerfed might stacking by toning down the most readily available sources of might. To make good use of celestial, a class needs:
-high uptime on a large amount of might stacks.
-spamable healing effects and/or high regeneration uptime.
-AoE skills with good physical damage and high condi pressure.

The right amulet for the right play style. If you want to run celestial, you have to make it count. Celestial literally forces you to go balls deep, roll over the opponent with lots of pressure or die trying… Else why are you running celestial in the first place? If you spend all the game nuking single targets from a distance, why are you using celestial then?

Before the might nerf, celestial really was broken. Right now, it seems to be in the right spot.

The best thing about the Dreamer is… Yeah, you need 250 Ancient Wood…
But at least, you don’t need 500 Ancient Wood… Or 500 Orichalcum… Or 750 Crystalline Dust(hello, Bifrost).

You need a single stack of almost every common ingredient for a legendary, which is actually fine. At the least you don’t need multiple stacks of anything. You need both Orichalcum AND Ancient Wood. Farming 500 Orichalcum in specific is way harder than farming 250 Ancient Wood and 250 Orichalcum. Parts of the resources should already be in your bank.

Forgot to mention: Now I even have the finisher to go with it

From an animation standpoint, Charr lean forward heavily, which means, if your main changes directions, walks sideways, etc, he will stick out like a sore thumb.
Also, Charr’s animations are up there with Asura animations in terms of having wide swings and large movements, which will again make spotting the real Mesmer easier.

So if you want to go with one of the lesser races, Norn would probably me more suitable than Charr. Still, nothing can match the greatness of the Asura.

Sadrien.3470:

Sb + Sb weapon swap vigils and acro Gm makes me the trolliest thief na… I evades everything and if somebody would give me the unicorn bow I could be even trollier!

Donations of unicorn bow to Sadrien.3470 if possible.

Farm your own Dreamer…
It’s one of the easiest Legendaries to farm ingredients for, honestly… Cheap rare ingredients(jewels), doesn’t need an unreasonable amount like 500 or even 750(hello, Bifrost) of any one ingredient, rather the ingredients are spread wide with 250 each, so you are bound to have some lying around already…

And it has kitten animations and annoys the hell out of my friend, which is, why I will keep using it!

I’ll make a Sylvari Revenant…
Probably gonna reroll as an Asura anyway, but you gotta give the lesser races a shot from time to time.

How about: Revert it to the way, it used to work? If you can’t be returned to the point, you will just be teleported halfway there?

on that note, what’s your stance on warrior stances?

Does Thief shortbow count as a crutch?

The only reason, not to run a shortbow would be some sort of quick pockets shenanigans… But any weapons, where this kind of playstyle was remotely viable got nerfed into the ground.

I don’t think, people nowadays still run S/D+S/D, for example, and even back in the old days, it wasn’t common.

I’d even say, that the thief’s shortbow is probably the single strongest ranged weapon set in the game.

I always wanted this skill on a thief rifle:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rapid_Fire_

It’s a mind trick…
Swap to rifle at the end of the whirl animation and immediately press f1.
As characters often do weird movement at the end of a whirl animation, the brain doesn’t register it as a killshot animation.

During testing, I only managed to have half the animations look innocent, though. There’s certainly some practice involved, if you want to reliably camouflage your actions.

just spam cluster bombs…
If you wanna be extreme, put 6 into acrobatics, trait for quick pockets and run dual shortbows. Cluster bombs for days.
Open world is all about tagging as much as possible… During boss fights, you can just spam blast finishers with your clusters.
As for gear stuffs, mostly berserker, for condition heavy areas, probably mix in some pieces of valkyrie/soldier’s.

When creating a new character, there’s one choice, every player has to make.
This choice is, whether he plays as an Asura or as a lesser race.

You don’t want to make the wrong choice, so go with the master race!

I don’t see a problem with the matchmaking system here.
I only see a problem with a small player base.

You know, you can create as complex and clever of a matchmaking system as you like. If there isn’t enough players to match against each other, there just isn’t enough players to match against each other. It’s not like the matchmaking system can just “create” opponents for you.

If the system would strictly only match 5 player stacks against other 5 player stacks, those stacks would have horrendous queue times(and probably start queuing as stacks of 4, which will then again rustle some jimmies, etc…)

Your first aim should be to get a full set of Berserker gear.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Equipment_acquisition_by_stats

If you want Exotics for cheap, your best bet should be:
Get rare items off the trading post and run dungeons. Citadel of Flame, Crucible of Eternity and Arah are the ones to get Berserker armor and weapons from. For a new player with bad equipment, I’d not recommend running CoE and Arah, so stick to the Citadel.
Prioritize weapons over armor, so get those Berserker daggers first. Especially, if you are short on money, don’t buy exotic equipment(as in armor and weapons) off the Trading Post. You will need that money to buy runes and sigils.

Also, unless you have been playing for a long time and just slow rolled your progress(and have a ton of laurels stashed), you will probably have to buy trinkets off the TP as well. If you got a ton of laurels, you can just get ascended stuff from the laurel vendor.
Especially with trinkets, if you lack the funds, buy rares. I would not recommend trying to craft trinkets off your first character. It will end up way more expensive than you could imagine.

The first level 80 character is usually the hardest to equip. Especially thief has extra problems, because with any other class, I’d just recommend getting a set of Soldier’s armor from the temples in Orr.

Edit: Scratch that. Which patch changed it so you can now buy berserker’s armor in Orr?
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Keeper_Jonez_Deadrun
Okay, change of plan. Do a LOT of Events and map completion, don’t spend Karma on anything. You need 252,000 Karma for a full set of Berserker’s Armor. Then run Citadel of Flames for the weapons.

Soilder.3607:

DavyMcB.1603:

It’s funny to have that only ‘pet’ skill when nothing in trait lines has anything to do with ‘pet’.

Plus, it would fit more on shout. I think.

There’s actually a trait in the BM line that reduces “pet” skills by 10% recharge time. This doesn’t apply to RaO, but only the two pet skills that have a cooldown besides their f2.

Ah, the wonders of development… Where long forgotten leftovers from discarded previous builds linger around and create inconsistencies left and right…

Healing Seed is by far my favorite.
It’s just so kitten versatile.
Got conditions? Pop seed. Low on health? Pop seed and blast/leap. Allies low on health? pop seed and blast.

All the other bundles(besides skull) are rather selfish. The seed can turn the tide of a team fight just by raw sustain.
AND it’s great against the ranger, it’s stolen from. It will either cleanse cripples from a power build or it will cleanse damaging conditions from a condi build. It creates an area, where the ranger can’t 1v1 you and allows you to go ham by just spamming finishers while face tanking damage to see, who will go down first.

If I could permanently swap out a utility skill for a stolen bundle, it’d definitely be the healing seed. Probably Shadow Refuge out, seed in.

Ballads.2509:

Anti-player Siege to me is like Biological/Nuclear Weapons. As soon as it starts it Creates an ARMs race. You build an AC they Build an AC, They build an AC you build a Cata, they build a Cata you build a Bali……, or we all just put the Siege away and fight it out with our ANET given class ability’s and leave the Siege for taking down the walls that divide us!

Well, if one side wants to stall to win an objective and the other side wants to win a field fight, it’s clear, who will win the arms race…

gennyt.3428:

dancingmonkey.4902:

gennyt.3428:

GreyWraith.8394:

any intelligent opponent will just move out of range.

In other words, the fight is done prematurely.

Yay!

This is the situation in which you miss the point. Intelligent leader see that they just controlled you with area denial and controlled the flow of your group. Something that is impossible for you when you limit yourself by refusing to use siege for no logical reason.

Nope, I think I got the point just fine. Move out of range and do what exactly? Build counter siege based on which group skillfully has the most the supply? Completely withdraw and hope more siege doesn’t go up at the next engagement? Terms like “area denial” sound pretty and tactical but since we’re talking open field fights in a video game, it becomes another way of saying “chase people away”, especially when there was really nothing to lose like an upgraded keep or something. Is that a win? Unless the group building siege is vastly outnumbered, I can see why it’s frowned upon.

Didn’t play any WvW for like a year, but I figure, the same base principles still apply.
If someone deploys open field siege, it is, because they don’t want you to pass.
Usually, it’s because they want to buy time for whatever it is, they try to do to happen. Whether they spotted a large Zerg coming to defend the objective, they are currently besieging or whether they just want to cut off reinforcements, open field siege is typically deployed at choke points to force opponents to take large detours or to chase them off completely.
Generally, the purpose of open field siege is not to win “the fight”, but rather to reverse the roles of attacker and defender. If the Zerg reaches the keep, they can man the walls, do repairs, build more siege, start employing hit and run tactics, etc.
If you can lock them out of the keep and reverse the roles of attacker and defender by creating a strong defensive perimeter in a choke point, you deprive them of those tactical options, while the time for their objective is slowly ticking down.

If the deployment of siege leads to a standoff with nobody achieving anything, it’s a waste of resources, though. Not a war crime or a breach of international law, like some people here claim, but still a waste of resources.

dancingmonkey.4902:

You seem to misunderstand that siege was part of WvW long before you were. What is happening here, is your bringing a knife to a gun fight, then crying fowl at those who brought the gun.

Hey, don’t speak bad about bringing knives to gun fights… I’d always bring a knife to a gun fight…
…In addition to a gun.

Sorel.4870:

naphack.9346:

You forgot “remove Skyhammer.”

Seriously though, skillhammer is one of the most obnoxious maps around. I really like the map layout, but that kitten skillhammer just hits too hard.

I’t also really easy to dodge, and lets you 5v4 the other team on the map. I don’t really like Skyhammer (I never pick it), but so do most players, that’s why it’s almost never chosen. If it is, it means a player voted for it, and he deserves a fait chance of playing the map. If you really, REALLY can’t stand one game of Skyhammer out of 30 unranked matches, play ranked.

If you CAN dodge it.
It’s not like the guy on skillhammer blasts away at empty points. He blasts on players, who are engaged in combat, possibly have already expended their dodges or are otherwise unable to react. If you plan on dodging and eat an entangle just half a sec before it goes down, you won’t be able to pop a cleanse and dodge in time. You are just dead.

You know, Skyhammer might be a fun map, if the canon dealt like half the damage, but inflicted a debuff(let’s call it disorientation) on anyone knocked around by it.
The debuff could even be an area effect, which happens regardless of whether you were hit or dodged the shot.

Just imagine Skyhammer leaving behind a field, where opponents move 50% slower and have reduced endurance regeneration instead of just one shotting everyone, who couldn’t dodge in time…
Let’s say, 7.5k damage and a field for 5 seconds.

You forgot “remove Skyhammer.”

Seriously though, skillhammer is one of the most obnoxious maps around. I really like the map layout, but that kitten skillhammer just hits too hard.

Justine.6351:

For racial skills, thinking glass cannon anyhow

Norn = snow leopard
Asura = technobabble or maybe D series golem
Charr = battle roar, hidden pistol or warband support
Human = prayer to kormir or reaper of granth
Sylvari = grasping vines, sylvan hound or take root

Some of these are questionable but certainly not worthless depending on what you want to achieve/ need to cram into build. Stacking lightning reflexes with hidden pistol would be hilarious gap maker. Grasping vines on a thief would be murder. 6 sec daze with technobabble ;-) solid condi cleanse with prayer to kormir so I can dump freaking healing spring. Battle roar for on demand fury/might before a signet of the wild/rapid fire burst. Reaper of grenth for getting in close with the gs ;-)
Many options to consider :-)

You are underestimating the ranger…
The best elite for norn rangers is bear form. There was a vid(which sadly has been deleted for no apparent reason) where a norn ranger would constantly dish out 22k crits against opponents in wvw.
The charge skill of the bear form has such a ridiculous damage coefficent that when combined with lots of might, signet of the hunt and opening strikes, something crazy will happen on impact.

Took the build for a spin in soloqueue.
As I am a sucker for sigils of leeching, I replaced the fire sigil on the shortbow with a sigil of leeching. Been a while since I had such a blast in soloq^^

As I’ve been running glass canon ranger with long bow + gs as defensive sidearm for 100s of pvp games way back, I felt like I just had to give 30/0/10/30 a spin.
First off, it is a wonderful build. Been running mine with Sigil of battle on gs + Runes of Strength for some time, but I switched to runes of the traveler+sigil of renewal(when I switch to gs, it’s typically, cause I’m having an opponent right in my face, so the heal is pretty much never wasted)
I still don’t feel like my setup is optimal(gotta test sigil of leeching, sigil of hydromancy, etc), but I feel comfortable with the rest of it. It’s a longbow+gs ranger, so it’s always fun to mess around with, but rtw just gives it some extra spice.
Back in the days, when I played most of my longbow ranger games, I found that it was great to have those big numbers against scrubs, who just stand there channeling meteor without switching to earth for mag aura or guys, who simply stood there, duking it out with my ally in the cap point… On the other hand, against opponent, who played the cap point well and danced around, it merely caused them some inconvenience. You stood there like a fool with your big canon, not hitting jack, till your ally finally managed to land a stun of some sorts.
With the new trait, your ally in the cap point can be a sand bag, it doesn’t matter as long, as he doesn’t die within like 2 secs. You will harass the opponent out of the ring simply by constantly hitting him. You will have a slightly smaller canon, but that canon WILL hit.
About SotF: It’s in a nice spot, where it doesn’t outperform the alternatives, but rather gives some niche in between. While spending the points in skirmishing would give you a higher crit damage, the fury uptime still makes up for some of the lost damage. While bond removes more condis on paper, with SotF, you can selectively clear conditions by choosing when to use it.

I’ve never considered a 30/30/10 build to be viable and that much still hasn’t changed. There is no reason to go 30 in skirmishing.
Back then, I mainly played 30/25/15, as having that protection uptime from constant dodges is far stronger than spending a trait point just for the stats tacked onto whichever useless trait you choose to take. I sometimes even went with 30/20/20, when I felt more like smashing faces in melee than sniping, but I never considered 30/30 to be a thing. It’s simply not efficient. Usually, if you make a high investment for damage and drop your last defense for even more damage, it’s because that extra damage is fully worth it. I simply don’t see the tiny bonuses from whichever you choose as your last trait being worth more than easy access to protection.

is it really worth getting over 5/6/0/0/3?

recently got my kitten handed to me by some d/d + sb condi bunker with krait runes and death blossom spam…
Don’t ask me for the details, I couldn’t get a similar build rolling, so I suspect, the player was simply way better than me.
He’d pop up and drop 20’ish bleeds and poison on me instantly with plenty of cover condis. It was not only, that he was especially skilled at dancing around me, what was more frustrating was, how he managed to keep those cover condis up all the time.

I play on a german server with an english client…
So basically, whenever I am thrown onto a server with other german people from different servers, I can’t communicate with them? What?
Such a helpful feature, really.

So, I just happened to complete my daily during a match and the experience granted gave me a level up…
Instantly healing me to full health.
It baffles me, how Arenanet couldn’t foresee this happening, when they tied the PvE achievements to PvP.

thecrius.4290:

Rose… there is a problem with this. Sometimes a world boss starts and in one spanish servers there are only 10 people waiting. For example the mega destroyer is impossible to do with 10 people.
So spanish people (for example) will never have the possibility to do some big world bosses because there is not so many people doing some bosses?
I think the mega server is a gerat opportunity to do the bosses you would never do in your server.

did megadestroyer with 10(admittedly, by the end of the event, it was 15) people, no problem.

People just didn’t do the math yet.
Sure, you are still able to run in circles in Queensdale.
The point is, it is not really worth it.
An event yields some 80 copper, a champ bag doesn’t yield much either.
In Queensdale, you mainly get white champ bags, some greens, hardly any exo bags.
Queensdale was only worth it because of the obscene amount of gold generated by bags and events. Now, if these sources of money are only slightly decreased(and the spider falls out of the window), you are essentially paying a way point to get your money back, pay the next waypoint to get your money back and pay the next waypoint to get your money back.
All you get are some green items, some mats, some bloodstone dust, some xp and some karma. You never get much net money out of it, cause the waypoint costs remain the same.
Frostgorge, on the other hand, got the events reinstalled. You’d need to do some reshuffling of the train order, but you now get some xp, karma and money from the associated events.
In my book, that speaks in favor of FGS, you just gotta figure out a new order.

Queensdale is not worth it anymore, because the rate, at which white bags drop is simply too high. It was never really worth it to begin with, because all it was good for was grabbing the event money and money from bags. With those factors out of the window, the waypoint costs are too high for it to really pay off in the end.
Frostgorge, on the other hand mostly got exotic bags, there is a high chance to get t6 mats from random trash mobs, but they put in a speed bump, where 3 champs spawn as a whole set, so the timer for the first in order to respawn starts after the third one is killed.
You could still find some other places to farm during this time. Maybe make a short break after troll and farm some t6 mats there, or farm icebrood till the event spawns. Like start the train at norn and kill stuff while waiting.

Also, cursed shore farming is still profitable It’s just not as braindead as the rest, as the opponents there can actually kill you

Which leads us to fourth: Server identity
So let’s say, you are a new player. You log in and the first thing, you realize is, that your server choice amounts to literally nothing. You chose a german server, yet everyone is speaking english. You chose “Drakkar”, yet everyone who DOES speak german, assures you, that Riverside is way better than Drakkar, and if you don’t believe it, all you have to do is look up the WvW rankings. What does your server choice amount to? Nothing. You better forget, which server you have selected, because it is of no importance, bears no consequences. You don’t need to know stuff like this, because you are not into PvP anyway.
I view this as a huge problem. It becomes even more complicated for:

Fifth point: Multi-purpose guilds
Right now, there is a lot of guilds, who do both open world, guild missions, aswell as dungeons, some PvP and most importantly WvW. Guilds like that are by definition in need of players from the same server.
because they do some WvW, right? So how do these guilds recruit players?
For pure PvE guilds, it’s no biggie. You grab whoever is in front of you. Boom. Done.
For pure WvW guilds, it’s also no problem. You grab, whoever you encounter in WvW. Boom. Done.
But these multiguilds have a serious problem. For every recruitment request, you’d need to include the server. And even, if your guild is not THAT WvW centric, it will serve to deter people who are mainly PvE based, because if you need only people from a specific server, you are surely some hardcore WvW guild, right?

TL;DR
From all these points, we can see, that it is a bad idea to introduce the megaserver system to cities, where there are NO largescale events, NO dynamic events and NO heart quests to complete. It destroys immersion for roleplayers, disconnects the WvW players from their home server, while destroying server identity as a whole and giving all sorts of trouble to casual all-purpose guilds, who do both PvE and WvW.
Most importantly, it alienates new players, who chose a specific language server and can’t speak the language, they chose. Everyone will be forced to speak english and Servers of other languages than english will be a laughing stock.

So my heartfelt appeal to Arena.net is:
For the sake of the players, who have created amazing communities on their servers, please do not smash these communities by forcefully deporting them to foreign grounds. For the sake of all the roleplayers, non-english speaking players, WvW players, mixed guild leaders and ultimately everyone. Do not attempt to fix, what wasn’t broken in the first place and fulfilled some vital roles, it will no longer be able to fulfill.
Cities do not belong on megaservers and you should acknowledge this fact quickly and adress the problem.

As my thread dedicated to megaservers in cities got shot down, I will post my opinion here again.

Let’s start about Megaservers in general. Megaservers are a good idea, as is, but the execution is poorly. That shouldn’t be the topic here, so we will move on from there. The main idea behind megaservers is to get rid of the drastic differences between servers. While there are “full” servers, where every map can generate an overflow, as soon, as a world event starts, there are rather empty servers, where nobody shows up for world events.
While guesting to Vabbi, my guild tried to make a joke of killing the shatterer with a 5 man team. It didn’t work, but that’s beside the point. The intent of these changes is to make large content more accessible to the masses. While this is a great idea, I have no idea, how this relates to cities in any way.
In cities, there is no large scale content, no events and no hearts to complete. From this standpoint, there is already no reason to merge the cities.
I will now present a couple of reasons, why introducing the megaserver system to cities is a bad idea.

First off: Language barriers.
While in open world zones, this matters far less, in cities, the rule of thumb was generally to speak in the language of the server, you have chosen. For our server, Drakkar, that language was german.
We chose german servers to be able to communicate in german. There are even people on our server, who can’t even speak english or at the very least are not very fluent in it. Even more, getting the map chat spammed in french or spanish is not really helpful either.
The main purpose of cities is to:
1) Give access to services
2) Give an area, where one can communicate with others.
That second point is severely influenced by the megaservers. You could happen to be the only german speaking person on a server full of french people. What if you have some questions to ask, because you are new to the game?
Someone new to the game, who has chosen a german server will surely find this a bad joke, when he has to use his bad french from way back in school to communicate with others. Heck, I may still be able to understand some basic french senteces, but as I never needed to communicate in french, I am not able to form a single sentence in this language.
Let’s turn it around. A french player landing on a megaserver dominated by Germans.

Second point: Roleplaying
While I surely do not belong to the group of players, who are actively roleplaying, there are many, who do. Outside of dedicated roleplaying servers, they are generally shunned or belittled. Even on Drakkar, which was once hailed as the german rp server, the irrational hatred towards roleplayers runs deep.
The problem at hand is, that especially the cities are like hubs for roleplayers. They mostly meet in the cities, they mostly rp in the cities. With the megaserver system in place, those players will have difficulties meeting up with other roleplayers. They will sometimes be thrown into hostile environment, where every attempt at roleplaying is met by snarky remarks from the bystanders. It will be hard to get any active roleplaying done, and while it does not seem important, the game will also be less immersive. If multiple people are roleplaying on their own in masses, the city will become “alive”.
An experience like that is also prohibited by the megaserver system, which brutally rips apart those rp communities and seperates them over different overflows.

Third point: World vs World
For lower tier servers, the cities are the only place to effectively recruit people. If some special event is going on, like in the case of Drakkar, for example, the 24 hour raid, there needs to be a way of telling the people who don’t frequent WvW as often, that you need people for a large scale offense. There may also be cases, where you need more people for defense, in which case, some people may also go to the cities and ask for help.
During the first season, this was more prevalent than it is now, but especially servers from even lower tiers than Drakkar will surely find it difficult to field people for WvW, when there is no place, where you are guaranteed to encounter people, who are mainly from your own server.
heck, with the megaserver in place, the probability is there, 80% of the players on the map are from your enemy server and decide to go to wvw themselves.
Especially for the lowest tier of servers, where there is no centralized teamspeak(which fortunately Drakkar has), the cities might be a place, where you can discuss and plan strategies for WvW. You are basically disconnecting the WvW community from its own server.

Can you please get back on track?
The topic at hand is specifically the cities. PvE zones actually benefit from the megaserver system.
Cities, on the other hand, should have never been made megaservers.

Minos.5168:

TL;DR: If you join a server with a specific language, you’ll be grouped with those people before random English-speaking players. If you RP, add your friends and you should be placed on a Megaserver with them.

And why is it, whenever I join a city, my chat is cluttered with english, french and/or spanish?

Which leads us to fourth: Server identity
So let’s say, you are a new player. You log in and the first thing, you realize is, that your server choice amounts to literally nothing. You chose a german server, yet everyone is speaking english. You chose “Drakkar”, yet everyone who DOES speak german, assures you, that Riverside is way better than Drakkar, and if you don’t believe it, all you have to do is look up the WvW rankings. What does your server choice amount to? Nothing. You better forget, which server you have selected, because it is of no importance, bears no consequences. You don’t need to know stuff like this, because you are not into PvP anyway.
I view this as a huge problem. It becomes even more complicated for:

Fifth point: Multi-purpose guilds
Right now, there is a lot of guilds, who do both open world, guild missions, aswell as dungeons, some PvP and most importantly WvW. Guilds like that are by definition in need of players from the same server.
because they do some WvW, right? So how do these guilds recruit players?
For pure PvE guilds, it’s no biggie. You grab whoever is in front of you. Boom. Done.
For pure WvW guilds, it’s also no problem. You grab, whoever you encounter in WvW. Boom. Done.
But these multiguilds have a serious problem. For every recruitment request, you’d need to include the server. And even, if your guild is not THAT WvW centric, it will serve to deter people who are mainly PvE based, because if you need only people from a specific server, you are surely some hardcore WvW guild, right?

TL;DR
From all these points, we can see, that it is a bad idea to introduce the megaserver system to cities, where there are NO largescale events, NO dynamic events and NO heart quests to complete. It destroys immersion for roleplayers, disconnects the WvW players from their home server, while destroying server identity as a whole and giving all sorts of trouble to casual all-purpose guilds, who do both PvE and WvW.
Most importantly, it alienates new players, who chose a specific language server and can’t speak the language, they chose. Everyone will be forced to speak english and Servers of other languages than english will be a laughing stock.

So my heartfelt appeal to Arena.net is:
For the sake of the players, who have created amazing communities on their servers, please do not smash these communities by forcefully deporting them to foreign grounds. For the sake of all the roleplayers, non-english speaking players, WvW players, mixed guild leaders and ultimately everyone. Do not attempt to fix, what wasn’t broken in the first place and fulfilled some vital roles, it will no longer be able to fulfill.
Cities do not belong on megaservers and you should acknowledge this fact quickly and adress the problem.

As I fear, that this topic will drown in the big thread, where many concerns for events, event sceduling, etc are handled, I am seperating it from the main topic, knowing of the existance of said topic and with the clear intent of doing so.

Let’s start about Megaservers in general. Megaservers are a good idea, as is, but the execution is poorly. That shouldn’t be the topic here, so we will move on from there. The main idea behind megaservers is to get rid of the drastic differences between servers. While there are “full” servers, where every map can generate an overflow, as soon, as a world event starts, there are rather empty servers, where nobody shows up for world events.
While guesting to Vabbi, my guild tried to make a joke of killing the shatterer with a 5 man team. It didn’t work, but that’s beside the point. The intent of these changes is to make large content more accessible to the masses. While this is a great idea, I have no idea, how this relates to cities in any way.
In cities, there is no large scale content, no events and no hearts to complete. From this standpoint, there is already no reason to merge the cities.

I will now present a couple of reasons, why introducing the megaserver system to cities is a bad idea.

First off: Language barriers.
While in open world zones, this matters far less, in cities, the rule of thumb was generally to speak in the language of the server, you have chosen. For our server, Drakkar, that language was german.
We chose german servers to be able to communicate in german. There are even people on our server, who can’t even speak english or at the very least are not very fluent in it. Even more, getting the map chat spammed in french or spanish is not really helpful either.
The main purpose of cities is to:
1) Give access to services
2) Give an area, where one can communicate with others.
That second point is severely influenced by the megaservers. You could happen to be the only german speaking person on a server full of french people. What if you have some questions to ask, because you are new to the game?
Someone new to the game, who has chosen a german server will surely find this a bad joke, when he has to use his bad french from way back in school to communicate with others. Heck, I may still be able to understand some basic french senteces, but as I never needed to communicate in french, I am not able to form a single sentence in this language.
Let’s turn it around. A french player landing on a megaserver dominated by Germans.

Second point: Roleplaying
While I surely do not belong to the group of players, who are actively roleplaying, there are many, who do. Outside of dedicated roleplaying servers, they are generally shunned or belittled. Even on Drakkar, which was once hailed as the german rp server, the irrational hatred towards roleplayers runs deep.
The problem at hand is, that especially the cities are like hubs for roleplayers. They mostly meet in the cities, they mostly rp in the cities. With the megaserver system in place, those players will have difficulties meeting up with other roleplayers. They will sometimes be thrown into hostile environment, where every attempt at roleplaying is met by snarky remarks from the bystanders. It will be hard to get any active roleplaying done, and while it does not seem important, the game will also be less immersive. If multiple people are roleplaying on their own in masses, the city will become “alive”.
An experience like that is also prohibited by the megaserver system, which brutally rips apart those rp communities and seperates them over different overflows.

Third point: World vs World
For lower tier servers, the cities are the only place to effectively recruit people. If some special event is going on, like in the case of Drakkar, for example, the 24 hour raid, there needs to be a way of telling the people who don’t frequent WvW as often, that you need people for a large scale offense. There may also be cases, where you need more people for defense, in which case, some people may also go to the cities and ask for help.
During the first season, this was more prevalent than it is now, but especially servers from even lower tiers than Drakkar will surely find it difficult to field people for WvW, when there is no place, where you are guaranteed to encounter people, who are mainly from your own server.
heck, with the megaserver in place, the probability is there, 80% of the players on the map are from your enemy server and decide to go to wvw themselves.
Especially for the lowest tier of servers, where there is no centralized teamspeak(which fortunately Drakkar has), the cities might be a place, where you can discuss and plan strategies for WvW. You are basically disconnecting the WvW community from its own server.

Here my thief with a rather cheap setup.
I dislike all those skimpy “armors”, which leave vital spots like the guts wide open, so the choices were fairly limited.

Thief starter hood,
Sneakthief shoulders,
Guild chest,
Predatory bracers(norn cultural),
HotW legs and boots

The whole setup(weapon not included) is like 3 gold and a couple hotw tokens.

For map completion in zones, you get 2 leveled pieces of equipment, a leveled black lion item and an amount of leveled crafting materials.
So if you didn’t get a transmutation charge, that’s probably, because you got more amazing stuff in the black lion slot(like, say, a black lion salvage kit, or a black lion key)
I completed caledon forest on a new char today(leveling with a mate). Whilst he got a transmutation charge, I pulled a key from my map, opened a chest, grabbed 2 rare dyes from a dye pack, and was happy.

Should be something like this.
Hits like a wet towel, but it will keep marching forward.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vIAQNBhYDbkpjWQL8wxDORDIIFaYVoUYH1R6RYwGrBA-zECB4hDamaAjoGi2Iw5nFRjtMqIasqZER16kYBAOAmf+kv8BzP/8zP/8d8xHf8xHPGAmA-w

Tp flippers take money out of the system by paying trading post fees over and over again.
Champ trains actively put more money into the system.
One side merely redistributes the wealth, while the other side effectively forces other players to grind in order to catch up with the inflation.
Sure, the prices are dictated by the tp flippers, but at the same time, those prices will only remain that high as long as there are people with money to burn.

so basically, power starts out at 900, while condi starts at 0…
Why would you do this anyway?

Eiland.1405:

If all they wanted was to make direct damage less dominate in PVE they only needed to do 1 of the 2 things:

1. increase every mob toughness by some percent or flat bonus
2. increase condition limit from 25 to 50 or something

These changes would’ve only effect PVE where the issue was, but yeah, expect ANET to ruin their own game even more and doing the exact opposite:
- zerker are needed more then ever in dungeons
- condi will dominate even more on all other game mods(wvw, PVP)

You said it right.
IF all they wanted… Only if.
They simply wanted to fix the disparity in equipment slots, where some slots were predestined for crit damage, while others were barely worth stuffing crit damage in, unless you went full damage anyway.

Some other dev then probably had the idea, that this was a great moment to address the damage in dungeons a bit, so they used this opportunity to cut away some crit damage.

Just make a sunrise and transmute it onto that^^

Ok. it’s crap.
Doesn’t deal nearly enough damage, no real pressure, no sustain.

At least the spvp version… Now, if we could still mix rabid amulet with barbarian jewels, it might be a different story. like this, it doesn’t have enough toughness, so even if they are not crits, they will still hit for upwards of 2k a pop.

Just wanting to point out, that critical damage food will prolly receive a nerf in the upcoming patch(down from +10% crit to +70 ferocity, which equals slightly less than 5% crit) while the +40% condi food will still stay the same.
That would have been the perfect opportunity to finally achieve equity amongst food.

Worked out a version for spvp.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vEAQJArdhMMKcWExzBf0AApgLhHCcAAjHa8BAA-ToAg1CqIkRJjTGjMSZsyMEYWB

Rampager’s gear, cause you can’t mix a barbarian jewel with a rabid amulet anymore.
Due to the high precision from Rampagers, the fire signet got dropped in favor of armor of earth. A very potent alternative would be cleansing fire.
Added another 10 points in fire to make bleeds reach 9 seconds duration and to grab the new grandmaster trait, which will be a great source of blind.
Sigils highly depend on what kind of changes the runes of balthazar will receive. I’d like to have the random burn procs come out at 2 ticks, so with current values, the +burn sigil is necessary.
Grabbed cantrip cooldown and added lightning flash to the hotbar.

If this test run works, I will buy condition gear for my ele to test it under real circumstances.

The thing is, you don’t really need to specifically trait for lb(tho the longer range trait helps) and the lb generally is more useful.
Rifle has a niche in specific rifle centric builds, but in any situation, where the ranged weapon is merely an option or not even on the main bar, just rotting in the inventory in case, you need to go range, the bow is far superior(and even in the case of fully range dedicated builds, they are still mostly even in terms of raw power, while the bow still beats the rifle in terms of utility)
So unless you want to make your build some sort of ranged weapon centric build, don’t go for the rifle. It needs very specific builds to break even with the bow.

That being said, I still use my Super Hyperbeam Alpha, cause it looks more kitten than any longbow out there.

ZenVenom.7214:

@naphack.9346

Actually, conditions are not THAT op. What’s op is the +40% duration food.
Let’s compare it to other values.
Cond food gives +40% duration as the primary attribute.

FYI, there is anti-Cond food that gives -40% duration as the primary attribute (lemongrass or something). Compare it with that and tell us what you find

@naphack.9346
Once you look at these numbers, however, everything fits right into place if you replaced the “40” with a “10”.

What??? someone lock him away and throw the key pls

@naphack.9346
If you are still not convinced, take a look at runes.

and you take a look at lemongrass

So you are saying, I should take a look at another broken food to justify a broken food?
You mean the food, which allows some profession nigh immunity to root/cripple/chill?

The food, which makes anyone not running +40% condi food on a condi build look like a fool?
Before I take another look at lemongrass, I suggest, YOU take a look at lemongrass and what it does to physical builds relying on immobilizes.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vEAQJArNhMMKbWEhPSAIoQgDGPC5DAA-zkCBoeIYNBkWAh8GgIAMTqIaslMFRjVzATliIq2hoIa1kCoIlVA-w

So basically, the idea was to play around with the new earth trait. As the damage output of physical builds tends to be rather low in earth, unless you are rocking a lightning hammer and I didn’t want to think about zerg busting hammer bunkers too much, because someone else will probably do it anyway, I tried to experiment with condition damage. As the conditions from skills are limited to bleeds, getting the burn proc from the fire line was a given, which means, the build will need some rabid and rampager pieces on top of the dire stuff.
For the weapon, as we are running on crit procs, scepter mainhand was a given, cause the auto attack can generate lots of hits. One may experiment with a dagger, but in my book, the blind on the scepter and the rock barrier will be more valuable than a gap closer and some immobilize. If someone tries to run at low health, we don’t need an unreliable immobilize and a petty gap closer, we torch them with signet of fire or use our elite.
As for the off-hand, there is not really much of a contest. In mono earth, focus beats dagger by miles. Churning earth is too gimmicky of a skill and while earthquake is good, so is an instant cast 3 condition cleanse with PbAoE damage and cripple aswell as some projectile reflection rolled into a single skill.
I don’t even want to start about that 4 second invulnerability, which allows us to still use skills.
At first, I was experimenting with a flame axe, but I soon realized, that in this build, it’s outmatched by the shield. It gives access to another invul, while passively providing vit and toughness. The autoattack stacks bleeds, it got cripples, dazes, pulls and a block, which stacks more bleeds.

Now, there’s still 20 points left to spent, an unused utility slot and the whole setup is all but written in stone(see, what I did there?)

What a build of this kind could be capable of doing:
-First off: BEING A MONO ELEMENT BUILD!
-Well, technically a mono element build. For group fights, I’d still switch over to fire from time to time, cause our AoE burning application is rather limited.
-it’s a new kind of bunker for ele, which does not rely on stacking obnoxious amounts of healing power

What this build still lacks:
-It’s a condi bunker without any poison application(humans could fix this with reaper of grenth)
-It’s also a condi bunker without any additional heals
-So basically, it’s not really good in dealing with other bunkers
-unless, they are crit based condi bunkers, that is.